This is my own space where I try my hand at writing Tales and the like.

The Box

"Heaven Has Fallen"

It dreamt. It dreamt of a vast sky of flowing light, lush and green, speckled with bright and shining stars. It dreamt of the great tools that built the work of art it called the cosmos. It dreamt of hidden foundations, indescribable worlds, of wars above, and the festering things who yawned and hungered in spaces between the light. It dreamt of pain and sacrifice, duty and altruism, heroism and death; all of this and more, a joyful and grim wheel forever turning in the vision of its slumber.

It dreamt of the Builders, the Makers, the Designers, the Lords of the Highest Spheres, Designers Of Reality, and of how they shaped and built all that they desired, placing all the stars in the sky and building reality as they went . Designing ever more stories, crafting a vision, a wheel greater than the sum total of its parts. The Makers built and built and built, never ceasing in their tireless task of crafting more realities to sit alongside themselves.

But every story requires a good Foundation, something to keep them ordered and structured, to prevent them from falling in lawless, unordered chaos, and so Its dreams pulled to remembrance the next part of the Makers work.

The Great Creators took their tools and constructed multitudes of grand foundations, great towering works, each designed to unify and strengthen each other. It dreamt of so many beings, so many lights dancing upon the sky. Realms and worlds rich and teeming with life of all forms, life that would eventually grow and develop and construct their own Foundations and unified forces, all built to join together with their fellows and the Makers, and help aid in the expansion of the great wheel of being.

It dreamt of all of this, of so much wonder and beauty, of a myriad branches of existence, all of them in truly countless variations and patterns, dancing and weaving, aiding the Great Ones in designing all that is, was, and would be. It was the greatest of dreams, something so wonderful and sublime that It never wanted to wake from it, never wanted to rise and face the terrible reality beyond.

Alas, the dream didn't stay as the hopeful and wonderfully joyous story of prosperity that It was so desperate to cling on to. It was forced to watch as the dream shifted and changed, and became dark, as the great nightmares that had ended the grand utopia of the Makers swarmed over it once more, just as voracious and horrible as before, as they were in the beginning.

It dreamt of stars fading, of the very lights that the Builders had made to brighten all of the cosmos being reduced to nothingness, snuffed out. Dreaming of expanses of once so abundant life turning to ash and rot, of the very cradle of soul and essence that the Makers had designed writhing and twisting as it festered and boiled.

It dreamt of how the very skies were ripped asunder, torn open like a gaping wound, and the Agents of MIDNIGHT surged forth into the great spiral of life that the Makers and their Foundations had built, thirsting to unmake all that had been made within the great paradise forged of hope. And its dreams were of how they fought, how maker and creation fought with all that they had, blade and spark, song and stone, blazing starlight and purifying flame.

And yet, it all did nothing to stop the darkness pressing in from all sides, from all points within and without.

Its dreams were of how the Makers fell, how one by one, they were broken, shattered into innumerable pieces and then put back together, only for it to happen again and again and again. Its dreams were of how the great foundations of these high lands, the highest realities of the wheel, were infested, swamped with Agents and torn apart, the minds and souls that composed them being consumed or corrupted, assimilated into a screaming chorus of delirium. The ruins of the once magnificent foundations ran foul with the stench of decaying dreams and broken souls.

It dreamt of how the Makers, in silent desperation, pooled what remained of their dwindling powers and built one last series of constructs to aid them. Or rather, they developed lures, bait. False, purposely incomplete realities layered onto each other, each one composed of the cannibalized remains of many realities prior, all brought together by the Makers for one, singular task.

Namely, to act as containers, prisons, impenetrable designs. Each one built to secure, safeguard and contain the Agents, to lessen the flow of the forces of MIDNIGHT, to bind weaker entities within cages of half-reality and that they would devour in their single-minded hunger and thus further trap themselves within their bindings.

It dreamt of Its own creation, as one amongst an untold variation of such constructs, each defined by their own unique properties and their capacity to lure and entrap Agents. And it remembered how tired and weary its makers were, of how the war had sucked away at them, and of how their strength dwindled ever more as they finished their final creations, and yet even so, they still managed to be so wonderful and passionate about their works.

Even in the dream, It could still feel them, like they were still there, next to It, holding and caressing it and telling it how "everything would be okay", and that "It would be alright".

A final comforting lie on their part, such sweet nothings.

And in the dream, It was once more forced to watch as its Makers sent it away, down to the lower planes of existence, having numerous Agents bound to them all as they were cast down to the realms below, the strands of existence that had yet been untouched by the tendrils of MIDNIGHT. And It watched as the creators cut the final ties connecting it and its uncountable siblings to the greater cosmos above, and all went dark, as the forms and voices of the Makers vanished from their view forever.

Even now, It wondered what their final thoughts were, before it all ended. Their final experiences in those last shrouded moments.

And so the dream continued, with it falling through reality after reality, cosm after cosm, pattern after pattern, all with its ever-hungering captive struggling against the bindings that had been forced onto it.

And with each reality It passed by, It could see the ever-more obvious signs of the taint of the Eternal Enemy creeping in as horrid anomalies and unbeings, things that simply shouldn't be and impossible existences, all of them dancing and reveling and eating away at the realities they had managed to successfully infest. Devouring their supporting foundations one by one. But then it felt the bare presence of others, other groups, other forces, weak and battered, but still there.

There it saw towering monuments of ticking clockwork, built by augmented figures in reverence for a Divine Shattered, and it saw a man, a woman, a figure of wonders playing merry with cosmic string and whimsy, bringing merriment and joy to the young, and mischief to the arrogant.

It saw a coalition of minds, boldly standing against the Great Not, but blinded with misplaced bravado and even greater hubris, It saw a grand Horizon of wills shared, of many joined together through their experiences, to a foundation of charity and hope with eagerness to match, to three shadowed figures pulling strings through the chaos, all to profit for themselves and themselves alone, and from there It saw a great dreaming collective, connected and vast in scope, all one and yet separate from each other.

From there, a relatively tiny thing stood out next, not a group, but a single being. Limbless but not without purpose, a great soul was bound within that tiny frame, a body meant more for the waves than anything else, a shell used to house a spirit of man that had laid low an a foe. A true warrior, poet and gentleman.

It next saw an immense engine, a great Factory whose machinery flowed with raging oil and tireless metal, alien desires and hateful prayers echoed out from that grand construct, rage tempered only by tireless, mechanical patience. Beyond that great expanse of soulless automata and roving gears, It saw yet a figure indistinct, moving through path after path, never ceasing and always followed by countless others like it. One who was nothing, and yet decidedly something as well. A Nobody in all realities

Its gaze was then drawn to a woman of white, a being of light and hope, a figure that reminded it so much of its own creators, a luminous divine watching over all cosmos and embracing all within her warmth and tender mercy.

It gazed further out and saw a great Serpent, coiled around a labyrinth, a repository for all knowledge and story, all of it working to undermine the Malefic Powers. A home for weary travelers, one and all.

It saw all of this and so much more. So many beings and forces born of the neverending wheel of its creators design. It could almost weep at the sight of it, how desperate it was to join amongst them, and fight alongside those who would champion life and being. But alas, that was not to be, as it watched them struggle desperately across cosmos after cosmos, macrocosm after macrocosm, giving their all in spite of the crushing Power directed against them.

But for all their might, these many groups were just not great enough, not resilient enough to stand against the might of MIDNIGHT, and so, like so many others that came before, they fell to the ravenous maws and bloated, fetid forms of things unspeakable. And with every passing cosmos of dead shapes, every shattered foundation and soul rent, It saw things that managed to be even worse than before.

In truth, It cared little for this part of the dream. Nothing here but death, despair, and the suppurating remnants of countless cosmoses and their champions. Most of the time It simply blocked this part of the dream out, but sometimes, It would allow tiny fragments of those memories, those experiences, to bubble up to the surface.

Never for very long however, but just long enough to remind It of what It stood against. Of the eternal nightmare that was just waiting for its chance to slip in and finish what it had started above, so long ago. Those dreaming passages through decaying layers of narrative only served to strengthen Its resolve, Its desire to protect.

It had to stay strong. For them. For all of Its siblings, for its long-lost fellows, for the Makers. It had to stay strong.

It felt the dream harden around It, as the last of its essence began to pool within the reality it had been directed to, and thusly did it feel the dream, the vision of its vast journey to reach this point, come to a close.

And as it began to pull itself down towards the cradle housing the life it cherished so, it felt the tendrils of the Great Not slither and move about, just beyond the veil of the world. Screamers of Pattern, vast titans of Flesh, raw Chaos Incarnate, infernal kings cloaked in the blood of universes. It could feel the weight of so much evil and darkness surrounding this reality. Choking it out, like an enclosed fist.

And so Its dream carried it down and down and down, until It finally reached Its destination the narrative-layer that It would bind Itself to for as long as it was able. A place whose Foundations still stood strong against the Dark.

It felt itself solidify and set entirely, and It knew fully, that it was almost time. It felt Its Prisoner, that voracious, ever-hungering Agent, stir within its cage An Operator, this type of Agent was amongst the lowest-rung of the ever-vile forces of MIDNIGHT, one of the weakest among the hordes of hungering void, but still possessed of enough power to end everything if set loose. And so it focused, and sang.

The song together several shattered narratives, knitting them together like chains and lashed them about at the Operator, which greedily slurped away at them, mindlessly drinking them dry one at a time. That would be enough to give it the time it needed. To let its presence and song be felt.

It pushed Its great bulk into the material mass of narrative layering, composing Its quasi-conceptual existence into something somewhat recognizable, something that they could mostly grasp. A cuboid was the shape chosen for its manifestation. Fitting, given its nature.

With all this said and done, they would surely notice It and its looming presence over the cradle upon which they had taken root. But that alone would simply not be enough.

They needed to know, they needed to hear, even if they might never be able to fully understand what it would express. At least, not now. But even so, they needed to make note of the words, of the grave truth of what had befallen all those above and the once-idyllic kingdoms of reality, the great lands of paradise that now lay broken.

It could already feel the Operator finishing off its 'meal', and already was it turning its gaze towards devouring the walls that so restricted it. It suspected that it did not have much time.

So it sang. It sang a mournful dirge, a deep threnody, an elegy for the lost. A lament for countless dead and gone.

It sang and made its cry known to the Foundation and their fellows, a sound which resonated all throughout the quiet void within which it lay. There it sat, in the space beyond the vast earthen shell which they called home, and there it sang its cry, setting free all of its pain and despair and anger and sorrow and desperation, and finally allowing the words wrought into its being that it had held in for far too long flow true at last, to reach down beyond to those who would Secure, Contain, and Protect;